The Womxn Project records (Ms.2020.001)

Biographical/Historical Note

The Womxn* Project is a non-profit organization in Rhode Island focused on building a strong, feminist, community-based movement to further human rights of Rhode Islanders by using art and activism to advance education and social change. The Womxn Project stirs social awareness and invites political action to inclusively further womxn's rights through creative advocacy campaigns and collaborative art projects.

In 2017, Jocelyn Foye, Jordan Hevenor, Sarah Markey, Andrea Preisch, and Mara Trachtenberg co-organized The Womxn Project in response to the election of President Donald Trump and a lecture series started at Hera Gallery called Creating Together. The group formed around a passion for womxn's rights and the goal to preserve safe and legal access to abortion in Rhode Island. With the potential overturning of the federal Roe legislation, each state's laws would dictate what happened to abortion access.

Combining their collective skills in grassroots activism and artistic creativity, they started hosting meetings at the Hera Gallery in South Kingstown, Rhode Island - one of the earliest women's cooperative galleries in the United States and now the fifth oldest. The outpouring of interest showed that Rhode Island womxn were interested in collectively working together to secure this right, one that had been tried for 24 years prior.

The Womxn Project found artistic ways to advocate for the passing of the Reproductive Privacy Act, originally referred to Reproductive Health Care Act, which was signed into law on June 10, 2019. These artistic activist projects, called artivism, included handwritten petitions scrolls, projections on the State House, a performative reading of the federal Roe legislation, and later the Community Petition Quilt to name a few. With the Community Petition Quilt, constituents could sign and decorate a square in support of the acts and the squares were then sewn together to create panels for a quilt that grew in size as they acquired more signatures. The quilt was hung in the Rhode Island State House during the 2018 and 2019 legislative sessions.

The Reproductive Privacy Act was passed in 2019 prohibiting "government interference in a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy 'prior to fetal viability.'" Abortion beyond that point is 'expressly prohibited except when necessary, in the medical judgment of the physician, to preserve the life or health of that individual." In lay-terms, this is the codification of the federal Roe legislation at the State level.

*The spelling of "womxn" takes the place of the common spelling of woman. The reason is because The Womxn Project is signifying a more inclusive approach and the 'x' spelling not only raises awareness about the prejudice, discrimination, and institutional barriers womxn have face, but it is also part of a movement aimed at advancing what are seen as womxn's rights within a human-rights based framework. This is done specifically in order to address the challenges faced by people living at the intersections. The use of this term is aimed at saying we want to meet the needs of womxn, but that we must also meet the needs of anyone pushed to the margins and limited by systems of oppression.